I Got the Willies Re Vivisection
April 16th 2009 21:00
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A couple of months ago, I saw a lady from Animal Liberation handing out flyers in Pitt Street Mall.
Normally, I avoid flyer people like the plague but when I realised the flyers were about animals, naturally I wanted one. Her non-pushy approach helped too. The flyer was about vivisection and mentioned web sites I could visit for more information.
Today, I had a look and got the willies straight away, especially after seeing the picture of the poor cat:
Animal Liberation link
It was too close to home for me. The thought of my beloved Butterscotch and Gingersnap being treated like that…(Butterscotch would probably bite the people in the lab several times before they got the chance to experiment on him but that’s besides the point.)
After reading more on the subject,
Wikipedia link
I felt helpless and sad.
On the other hand, as the flyer pointed out, I do have choices. For one thing, I tend to buy beauty products from the Body Shop, whose products are said to be not tested on animals. Secondly, even when I was in high school, I refused to participate in science experiments involving animals. Just seeing the dead animals and what other students were doing to them made me sick. Luckily the teachers I had never forced me to participate. Looking back, I am proud to be the only person in the class to do that. Even then, I couldn’t understand the whole point behind these experiments, even though the teacher took pains to explain to us that a rat’s internal organs were the same as a human being’s. In that case, why not bring in a dead person and get us to cut it up then?
The irony was, I was interested in a career in medicine so I would have been happy to see a human autopsy. Seeing the same thing happen to an animal is a different story which is why I couldn’t become a vet.
What really gets to me is that lack of choice animals have. While a human being can agree to donate their body to science, or to participate in clinical trials while still alive, an animal has no say in the matter. Who gives humans the right to decide for them and to force them to be experimented on when the ability to extrapolate results from animal testing to humans is still questionable?
The next thing I plan to do is to cut down buying leather goods and eating meat. Every little bit counts!
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